5. Some people are fighting some other people and you don’t really know why because everybody is speaking in this weird jargon that is never actually explained unless you take like an hour out of your day to sit down and read a mountain of text and even then still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and you’ve got these six characters and a vast majority of them are monomaniac assholes except for the inexplicably Australian lesbian couple from another world who were frozen in crystal for like three hundred years. And then you fight the robot pope.

In case you’re wondering where the Die Hard joke is, these are all things that actually occur in Final Fantasy XIII. There was no room for the Die Hard joke.

I’m on disc 3 of Final Fantasy XIII right now and – despite promises that it will get better that have kept me playing – it is still exactly the same after 25+ hours of gameplay on my part. I played through it up until this point and had fooled myself into thinking that it was okay; different, yes, but not bad. There are things about the game that I admire from a design perspective – the much-maligned combat system is the sole bit of enjoyment I derive from the game and it reminds me of a mashup of the engine behind FFVIII and FFX-2, two of my favorite games in the series.

But the severe lack of engagement with the world takes the role-playing element out of what is ostensibly a role-playing game. You literally walk in a straight line. Then you fight. Then there’s a cutscene. Then you repeat ad nauseum.

I find myself in an unenviable situation. I have invested a full day of my life into this game already, I am on the final disc and I am compelled to finish it because I will not let it beat me. On the other hand, the act of playing the game makes me feel fatigued at this point. Part of me wants to go and trade it in and buy something better, but another voice keeps whispering that it might get better at some point.